(This comment follows from
The Brain is Not a Mind.)
I’m interested in psychology in its ‘folkish’ focus on two main levels, neither of which require any vindication from any quarter. The most interesting level to me is simply applied and phenomenological: what is the self-report? How are self-reports given by the subject, and reflective of the subject’s experience and motives, (etc.) suggestive of their future behavior? …and suggestive of much more, including past behavior, past ‘being.’ Also, how is knowledge of the subject and aspect of learning from being given a self-report?
At the individual level, does the individual approximate something like an individualized culture?
Anyhowsa. We type out in a strong sense nothing but these classes of self-reports as we communicate here and right now.
Obviously, also in these terms, the sheer informality of almost all human communication, falls into this class of exchanges of self-reports. We are unable to say that this doesn’t exist. The ‘ontic’ problem is about something else of course, and is not about whether or not there exists reflexive reports contingent on humans believing that communication is justified simply for instrumental motives, and, because of some prior commitment to, well, whatever is the praxis for any report. By this I mean, what are the applications of the prior experience of communication.
This noted, I’m interested as an observer of the ironic contretemps–and this contretemps has an ancient history–surrounding how these same phenomena can be viewed within the purview of, or framed by, a rigorous philosophy of mind. But this is a side matter too. Ironically, nothing rides on this. As John Lilly put it, “My beliefs are unbelievable!”
Still, there are the contests of philosophy of mind. This, for me, falls into the meta-frame of the philosophy of meta-science. Wow! Or Zappa: “wowie zowie!” I raise you one ‘meta’ now call, raise, or lay down your cards.
(cybsoc.org)
The pressures here, and they are various, also pressure neurobiology, semiotics, ecosemiosis, linguistics, and any discipline one may be, in effect, ‘disciplined by.’ The system philosophizes about the philosophical system.
This lands on a fundamental problem: how does the (a) system derive a rigorous means of justifying verification of its own phenomena? Can this be done within the logical type given by the system itself? Certainly, neurobiology does not explain itself. Neurobiological explanation requires a conceptual system that is not a neurobiological system. Thus, this problem lands in the territories of other problems; demarcation being another pressured situ.
Take the chicken and egg metaphor: is it possible to say what comes first? If we speak of a sufficiently developed mathematical conceptual system prior to employing same for mathematicizing a discipline and its phenomena, how would we then understand what phenomena is necessary to the emergence of the sufficiently developed conceptual system in the first place?
Then consider that human navigation of the environment is not itself very conceptually advanced.
common sense is often not thought through very well.
Yup. What would come first for common sense to evolve to be thought through very well?
Consider that to explain what a better common sense would be when it is about explanation is to direct common sense to be true, maybe even scientific, “powerful in its predictions.’
What is the veracity given by the conceptual system employed to explain a system that ontologically exists
prior to its conceptualization via an explanatory system? Example. What would our expectation be of a psychologist trained to avoid the common errors in cognition that underlay all the biases, fallacies, ‘entrainments,’ over and under determinations, etc.?
